I had an interesting exchange with a blonde girl who was very enthusiastic to find me (after a stretch of pretty gross non-lucid dreams involving these slug and snail like things that were reproducing and growing out of control in a house).

She was taking me to see some doctors. As I tried to put on some shoes to leave wherever we were, I warned her that I was probably not going to make it because I'd wake up soon.

her: "Yep, I've got a device that reads that out, and no you don't have much time. But don't worry too much. These doctors may not be the best conversationalists you've ever met, but they can bring you back from the dead."

(Note: I had the impression that these 'doctors' were some kind of machines, hence they didn't talk.)

me: "Well I don't know how that applies here."
her: "It turns out that when you die, you're actually... only... mostly dead."
me: "Which is still partly alive?"
her: (laughing) "Exactly."

(Note: Our conversation seemed to be understood as alluding to a scene from The Princess Bride.)

me: "I suppose it figures that on the good side of me having a sense of humor, it might endear me to those who'd bother to figure out how to resurrect me after I die. But they might be more interested in making jokes than giving me straight answers."
her: "Price you pay. Okay then, straight answer time: I need to know what date you think it is."

I did some rough calculations based off of when my birthday was and some things I remembered. I was one day off, and had a mixup of which days of the week were which numbers, but I did manage to nail April 2008 and I gave enough other information that should have worked.

her: "All right, that's good enough I think. But you need to do something about having a watch at the top of your mattress."
me: "What does that have to do with anything? I have an alarm clock. And a laptop at the foot of the bed, that has a clock in it."
her: "You need a watch close to your head."
me: "Come on. Why does how close it is to your head matter at all?"
her: "It affects your mind..." (makes wavy mind control gestures)
me: "I still don't understand. Can it be the kind wound by a spring? Powered by a battery and quartz crystal? Powered by wrist motion? How can all of these have a common element other than the general perception of time you can get by looking at a clock across the room?"
her: "All up to you, you're the one swallowing it!"
me: "I am not going to eat a watch!"
her: "That's a joke, joke ok! Do NOT eat a watch. But seriously, have one close to your head."

I woke up.

(Note: Probably not going to do this. I try to generally not act out suggestions made by dream characters that involve purchases or rituals that might make me look crazy(-ier).)

A strange bathroom experience cued me into realizing I was dreaming. There was a young boy who helped guide me out of the bathroom and into a clearing.

me: "Thanks for your help...now I need to get my bearings. My senses aren't reliable right now. Can you assist?"

He tried to give me directions through a nearby building, but I asked to just be taken directly to who he wanted me to meet. Once we went inside, there was some odd set of rules in place in terms of who-could-go-where based on what kind of object you were carrying.

boy: "In order to get through, you need to be carrying a gray drawer."

He tried to get me to pick up a gray plastic tub from a pile of multicolored tubs. A label on that tub identified the holder as being from some kind of newspaper.

me: "I don't feel comfortable misrepresenting my credentials to get somewhere. Maybe you could carry it instead?"
boy: "Nope, not me!"
me: "Well, the last thing I need is a reputation as a liar. What should we do now?"
boy: "You could talk to the data manager."

He pointed me toward an older German-looking man standing at the desk of a library, who was wearing a name card around his neck that said DATA MANAGER.

me: (jokingly) "Hi. I'm some data, I need to be managed."
manager: (amused) "If you are data, then where is your method?"
me: "My method is perhaps lost in my madness."

Because I got the impression that he was smart, I decided to abandon my quest to go elsewhere and just talk to him.

me: "Have you heard of schizophrenia? Or lucid dreaming? Do you know what it means when I say 'I am asleep somewhere'? From my point of view, I entered your world moments ago and will wake up shortly in my own reality."
manager: "You are confused because you try to model that these things are happening in a simple sequence. You have a constructed idea of linear time, and it isn't *actually* working like that."
me: "Can you explain to me how time *actually* works then? It would be great if I could take some testable information back. Some kind of scientific breakthrough would be very helpful if I were to make it on the basis of talking to you."
manager: "That will be difficult to express in your... what you call... 'Facet Logic'."
me: (confused) "Facet logic?"
manager: "Umm... I need to translate..."

His accent got heavier, and he paused.

manager: "The 'physics'?"

(Note: I like the phrase "facet logic"—it appears some on pages about semantic web searches but no one defines it.)

Suddenly we were interrupted by a woman who came by.

woman: (to him) "This facility is being inspected today. You shouldn't be chatting, you need to be attending to your duties."

I was using some kind of messaging system and there was a conversation going on about technical issues. I'd just gotten a reply to something I had said.

reply: (written) "Well, all right. But you wouldn't be changing the software at that point—you'd need to fundamentally change the computer itself."

I wanted to post some kind of reply to it, but I was taken to an information screen explaining that the thread had been closed. I had two options: I could either "start a new thread" or "enter a reply in the sender's own time."

I had a rare instance of being intentionally lascivious in a lucid dream. I was in a grocery store and summoning cute girls for sex acts. But at one point, this guy named Carl Sarranack objected to my behavior and demonstrated his disapproval by throwing powdered barbecue sauce on my head.

(Note: There is at least one recipe on the web for Powdered Barbecue Sauce.)

This was followed somewhat soon after by a false awakening. And I really, really thought I was awake—even though there was someone in my bed who shouldn't have been there. We were reading up on Carl Sarranack.

One of the things we found was a Far Side cartoon making fun of him, captioned "Carl Sarranack has another idea...". It showed him looking at a clock and something else. I didn't get the joke, but apparently it played on the fact that he was the inventor of instant coffee, thus perhaps he was making something instant that obviously shouldn't be.

(Note: In our branch of the multiverse the credit for inventing instant coffee goes to Satori Kato.)

There was a part in a dream where I was non-lucid, playing a video game that was some kind of monochrome variant of the video game Cloak and Dagger at an arcade. Every 100,000 points there was some sort of policy that I would win a plastic container full of popcorn, but I had to fill this container myself. I started stressing over the precise policy... like, was it every 100,000 points on a single quarter or was it every full game played for a quarter where the total score exceeded 100,000?

(Note: This was not lucid, and I only report it to give some context.)

After this I was trying to drive a car and it was out of control. I couldn't stop at stop signs and generally I was concerned about navigation because I didn't know where I was. It began to float, and I was somehow on the road hanging onto the car above me... when I decided to just let it go. It went flying into the air like a balloon.

As I stumbled onto the sidewalk, I ran into an older black man. I greeted him and mentioned that it was too hard to hold onto the car, so I just let it go. We embraced, as some men came up the street.

me: "If you help me, you can have the car. Or whatever. I just need information."
men: "We need the keys. We can't take the car without the keys."

Reaching into my pocket, I emptied the contents. I handed over a backpack I was carrying as well. The black man began writing on my hand with a sharpie.

black man: "If you need me, here's my contact information."

As he started to write, he noticed that the word "negative" was written on my hand already.

black man: (raising his brow) "That changes things."

He thought a little, then scratched out what he had written and wrote something else.

me: "Is that some kind of code? How can you be sure you've read everything you need to read? What if it's a... double negative?"

He and a group of people led me to a nearby shack-like structure. They began some kind of process of gently spinning me and carrying me, which kept me in the dream. They seemed good.

me: "Have you ever seen the movie A Scanner Darkly?"
someone: "I think I saw that one, yes."
me: "Well, if you watch it, that's what I feel like. I wonder if I've made some kind of choice, or if I'm involved in some kind of strange project I don't remember getting involved in. Is there hope for what I'm doing here?"
someone: "I'll say what you are doing is something that has definite potential."
me: "I'm going to wake up, and that's going to be the end of this conversation. Unless you have something you can do."

A man with a full bottle of water sprayed it on someone else, it made a big splash. When he sprayed it on me it felt like air.

me: "That looked like water when it was splashed on the other person. When you splashed it on me, it felt like air."
someone: "You're going to have to learn to fail at some things."
someone: "So far you have done very, very well."
me: "What year is it here, where you are?"
someone: "Hope springs eternal."
me: "That's not what I would call a 'time'. Like, the year 2007, or... two o' clock on Easter Sunday. Those are what I would call 'times'."

I remarked that I'd just felt a sudden rush of blood to my hands, then I woke up.

While lucid, I was speaking to some folks at a lunch counter about their resemblance to people I knew. My goal was trying to figure out if my mind was building a projection and whether that projection was meaningful or not. There was a blonde girl I did not recognize at all standing next to me in line.

me: "Hi there, what's your name?"
her: "Mickey."
me: "Oh Mickey, you're so fine! In this case, it's true. So... I'm going to ask you about manners of etiquette and conduct in parallel universes. I'm trying to understand what's going on."

I asked about sexuality and we ended up naked together. I noticed she had a tattoo of word "deeper" written in a script font. Whether it was intended to do so or not, this provoked me to start asking more questions. I held her to the ground and asked her to stay in visual contact so that I could retain her attention.

me: "Do you have an email address?"
her: "The California Loner."
me: "Okay, at... what? What's the rest of it? Gmail, Hotmail..."
her: "It's not that kind of address."
me: "Well okay, so it's your 'handle'? I mean, can I search the internet and find you through that? Well, let me break down my address for you, and I give you explicit permission to email anyone who has it. It has the nice properly that anyone you write better be cool or they're using it falsely. The first part it's a Greek prefix..."

I proceeded to give her the details of my usual non-realityhandbook network identity. She seemed to get it down, and at one point she got up.

her: "Oh no, the knots, I have to work it out."

At first I thought she was going to try and encode the information in a series of knots, as with Incan Quipu. But she was sitting with a piece of paper and writing numbers on lots of squares, it looked more like Sudoku. I thought maybe she was doing something important, but she unhappily pronounced that all the numbers were coming out the same.

me: "I have *no* idea what you're doing. Do you remember how to look me up?"

She was about to say something back and I awoke.

(Note 5/30/2008: There is currently a profile for someone called "california.loner" on Yahoo! Answers who asked one question, which has been deleted but is in Google's Cache. The question was: "All of the times on programs and all other sites are correct except my Yahoo email account. time. Can you help me to correct this? Thank you. BTW, i'm using the older Yahoo system.")

I was in some kind of store where I could purchase VR 3-D models that were animated. It let you look at and hold the models for a limited time (mine were of construction tractors) and then it would kick you out of the previewing room. My preview time was running out, and I was being pushed out of the room and began falling down toward the floor of something.

Rather than be afraid, I decided to do my best to land safely. I was on the ground floor of some kind of tall building, and I decided to yell out for help.

me: "Help! Take me to customer service."

To my surprise I started flying up into the air. The grayish columnar building I was in gave way to another building that looked more like a conventional set of apartments. As I approached walls and structures I just floated right through them, and I was deposited into an office. A few people were around, but I was at the desk of a particular woman.

me: "How is it that I can just go through these walls?"
her: "Because you're free right now. And I mean free as in...not free."

(Note: She was making some kind of joke that I didn't really understand, but that I interpreted to say that I was not a paying customer of her business, and thus I was a second-class citizen in terms of how I was treated and what I was allowed to do.)

me: "What's happening? I'm from the year 2000. Where am I, what is this?"
woman: "Time isn't really...Look, you're in the same place you always are, which is the omniverse. And you're going through a neurofissure reconstruction right now."

(Note: I made up the word neurofissure here because I can't remember the one she said, but it sounded kind of like that. Dealt with brains.)

me: "I don't know what that is. Can you explain? Actually, can you show me something I can take back and use as proof of having been here?"

An office worker passing by stopped and put in his two cents.

office worker: "What would you do with your day tomorrow if you had it?"
me: "I'd write it down. Go to a restaurant with a cute girl at some point. Be happier because the world would listen to me 'cause I'm provably not insane."
woman: "Cute girls aren't that interesting."
me: "Well *I* like them, but it's really just aesthetics. And that wasn't the point, I just meant to say that my needs are modest and I really am just looking for validation. I need you to show me something."

A video showing a magnet with a configuration of holes in it flashed before my eyes. It looked like a cube built out of several layers of material.

woman: "I can show you how to make a zero-pole-magnet. And NO, not the dumb way. Actually it's already been invented and the inventor isn't doing anything with it...you can look him up, his name is..." (she said some name here I forget)
me: "Names never work, can you show me how it's made?"
woman: "Really you should just look up the paper. Though you're only 25, so it's not surprising it's tough for me to understand."

I didn't correct her on my age. Only now do I notice that naming the year as 2000 might have thrown off an age estimate. Had it really been the year 2000, that would have been correct.

me: "I think I deserve some slack, considering that I am able to achieve basic dialogue while asleep."

I didn't get any more information before I rather suddenly woke up.

(Note: Apparently a torus is already a zero-pole magnet, but may be the "dumb way" since there's no strong field on the outside, thus it wouldn't stick to a refrigerator. I sparked this discussion on Usenet which seemed to suggest there's not a good way to build a strong magnet with no external poles.)

I'd managed to grab control of a dream somewhat, to the point where I was able to twist seeing an animal into having that be my dog from childhood. This made me happy, and I decided to just enjoy the experience of playing with him a bit. I wanted to see how long I could keep him there.

(Note: This reminds me of all those stories many people told about seeing pets during out-of-body experiences as they go toward the white light.)

My attention turned to a large car that busted into the side of one of the room's walls.

woman's voice: "All of this never was."

Feeling a bit cocky from my ability to bring a dog out of thin air, I just climbed up the car to confront them. Some strange and ugly-looking people were riding on top of the car, who started talking to me about stuff I don't quite remember about one of my birthdays.

ugly woman: "...and this all ties into that incident which happened on your birthday, where you and your parents confronted the fact that you didn't have a close relationship."

For a time I turned over in my mind whether that happened, but I realized they had the day wrong.

me: "That's not my birthday, which is much easier to find out than reading minds or videotaping my childhood. Which is what you would have had to do in order to have any of the other information right. Do you even know who you're speaking to? What's my full name?"
ugly woman: "Well, we have your ID."
another woman: "Don't let him see it!"

I snapped it out of her hand, expecting to see some random person's driver's license. But it wasn't a license at all, just a business-card-sized picture. I was standing in front of a large sign that said "The Future of Urban Design", and it was dated 2018.

A friend of mine had bought a rather complex cell phone.

friend: "Damn it. I canceled the plan for this phone, but now they won't let me return it. To make matters worse, I paid for it with a loan based on equity against my house.
me: "I don't think it's very common to take out loans against your house to buy a cell phone. Was it really that expensive? Couldn't you have bought it outright?"
friend: "Didn't think of that."
me: "Oh, wait, this is totally nonsensical. Obviously a dream. All right, Mr. Gadget...here's one of my favorite new dream questions...what was the hot Christmas item last year?"

I started bragging a bit and exaggerating my abilities.

me: "But don't limit yourself. I'll remember anything after I wake up. Try chemical formulas, movie summaries, engineering diagrams. Just describe it. But obviously, try to optimize for both 'simple' and 'cool'."

He showed me an odd hi-tek product brochure, which was actually a flipbook. The product in question was a keychain clock of some kind, though it looked a bit more like an odometer. The diagram had little padlock icons shown on each wheel. I was able to ask the flipbook to pause and go back or skip past seemingly random graphics which had no substance.

(Note: The gist of this catalog seemed to be that they carried products like at The Sharper Image...high priced specialty items for people with too much money.)

A movie played about how the keychain could be thrown into molten lava and be preserved. One woman in the ad gave a testimonial that she had started a whole religion by throwing hers into a volcano.

me: "I'm not sure I understand. The gimmick is that you can throw it in a volcano, and it will keep whatever time you had locked in before you threw it in? I don't see how locking down the dials is all that interesting, though knowing how to make a material that could resist molten lava would be very valuable to me."

(Note: I can't help but allude to the Deep Thought by Jack Handey which says:

"If you drop your keys into molten lava, just let it go...because man, they're gone."

I was working with a computer system, that was all about management of licensing of elements for creating a cartoon television show. That it held up to inspection pleased me.

(Note: It was a large database like IMDB...it was very obsessive about copyrights. If you used a voice generator, such as if you wanted Bugs Bunny to say a certain sentence, you'd be automatically adding an attribution in your cartoon to say "character's voice appears courtesy of..." and then some big studio conglomerate.)

Somehow I loaded up a web browser and opened my email account. It was full of what looked like spam messages, and I looked at the system clock and it was 6/2004. Someone at a nearby terminal looked on.

me: "Y'know, when I went to bed, it was August 2005. Is there anything you can tell me about this deviation in time?"
guy: (stiltedly) "When...they build...a clock to hang...on the wall...they don't make it out of pepperoni. They make it...out of...touch paper."

(Note: That sounds fairly nonsensical, but I understood this as saying that the world is made out of elements that are more complex than you think. So for instance, you might buy a poster at a store and believe it can only show the image it had when you purchased it...yet secretly it might be an advanced technology like an Organic Light-Emitting Diode...thus it could change at any point at time)

me: "Okay, that didn't make much sense. If time is not absolute, can you tell me anything about the future?"
second guy: "An ex-cuban destroys the U.N. in four years time."
me: "What letter does their name start with? Is there any hope of verifying their existence?"
second guy: "You have not heard of this person. The name is Selena Derella."
me: "Okay, is that a man's name or a woman's name?"

I didn't get an answer before waking up.